Mean Girls (2004)

Tina Fey wrote it after reading Rosalind Wiseman's self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes, a guide to how teenage girls build and police cliques, and the research shows. Lindsay Lohan's Cady arrives at a new school, is adopted by the Plastics, and discovers that taking them down means becoming one of them. For adults the treat is how precise it is about social power: the rules about wearing pink on Wednesdays, the Burn Book, the way a compliment can be an attack. Fey also plays the math teacher who gets the best grown-up lines. Choose Mark Waters's 2004 original over the 2024 musical remake, which loses much of the bite.